The Man Who Never Was

„Once upon a time, McCain might have even been among the first to acknowledge his changed positions. The self-cleansing confessional has long been his stock-in-trade. When a student at Boston College asked him in 2006 how he stayed true to himself, he replied, »Well, I haven’t always, and I’ve learned a bitter lesson. When I’ve done things that I knew weren’t correct, I’ve paid a very heavy price for it.«

For the past 20 years, perhaps no one has had greater influence on McCain’s self-image, or on the public’s perception of it, than his faithful speechwriter, co-author, alter ego, and former chief of staff, Mark Salter. Salter can expound wisely and knowingly on the Tao of John McCain. In the dark aftermath of the 2008 defeat, Salter scaled back his involvement in McCain’s world. He gave an elegiac assessment of his boss to David Remnick for his book The Bridge, about the meaning of Obama’s election: »The truth is: all that will be remembered of the campaign is that America’s original sin was finally expunged. That’s all. In history, that’s all. The real McCain will be lost to history. He’s got years ahead of him, but he is lost to history. The narrative is the narrative, completely untrue and unfair, but he is the old guy who ran a derogatory campaign and can’t remember how many houses he had.«

Yes, you can make that argument—that the grand sweep of history, in all its majesty and indifference, will leave behind a false version of John McCain. But you can also make another argument, and it’s the one John McCain himself has been making powerfully by his behavior and example. It is that history has revealed the real McCain at last.”